March 16. Hand to mouth. Ayami Awazuhara and Elia Nurvista

Saturday, March 16, 18:00–21:00
Hand to mouth
Ayami Awazuhara and Elia Nurvista

For a one evening event at TIER, Elia Nurvista and Ayami Awazuhara invite the audience to share their thought through foods, how eating habits or the basic nourishment of one’s own culture travels as a body travels.

A hand of someone, large, small, bold, thin or boney is different and individual. A hand has temperature and sensory function, and the skin and lines on the palm shows how we have aged. Not only thinking of where the food is from, from a field to mouth through a marketplace and kitchen, who has touched the food? Who shared the warmth of their hands with the food you just ate?

Starter:
Ayami shares her two recipes that use fermentation. There will be a demonstration and tasting of pickles in wheat bran and gazpacho with left over rice water. Fermentation as an alternative clock of endurance, she shares the idea of food as medicinal usage for both body and mind.

Main:
Elia questions the invisible structure of food preparation and how it is related with domestic work and the activity of caring, usually taken for granted as a wife/woman/mother’s job in the family. She will prepare some home/soul food from Indonesia in the kitchen, which is considered a private space but whose integral activity of cooking will be projected into the public space at TIER. Through this event, she intends to discuss hospitality and invisible labour, both in daily life in the art scene.

Ayami Awazuhara looks for the consequences of hybrid cultural appropriation and transitional processes in the everyday and omnipresent.
A stone, or an orange can become a starting point for a reflection on systems of classification as well as their impact on the design of our world of experience. This practice results in installations, artist’s books, videos and photographs as well as in performances and sound pieces by means of which Awazuhara introduces the phenomena considered into communicative situations, thereby altering the phenomena themselves.
www.ayamiawazuhara.com

Elia Nurvista
Elia Nurvista (*1983 Yogyakarta, Indonesia) is a young Indonesian artist whose practice focuses on food production and distribution and its broader social and historical implications. Food in various forms — from the planting of crops, to the act of eating and the sharing of recipes — are Nurvista’s entry point to exploring issues of economics, labour, politics, culture and gender. Her practice is also concerned with the intersection between food and commodities, and their relationship to colonialism, economic and political power, and status. She runs Bakudapan, a food study group that undertakes community and research projects, and her social research forms the background of her individual projects, presented through mixed media installations, food workshops and group discussion. Her previous installations use a range of materials from crystalline sugar sculptures to sacks of rice, often incorporating video or mural painting and an element of audience interaction. She lives and works in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
www.elianurvista.com
www.bakudapan.com

Photos by Benjamin Busch